Having decided to take a year and a half off from college, I'm now giving myself a change of scenery and a break from the high-school-college-work paradigm. During this time, the plan is to make peace with the issues I've set upon myself and to generally become a happier, more self-assured human being. I want everything I do to mean something; no more pointless experiences, no matter how much time I spend sitting in bed watching TV and movies on my computer. Everything will count.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Communication rant.

Communication is one of the most valuable skills someone can have. In my mind, it's one of the most important aspects to life, especially in a professional setting (but really in any setting at all). I've always been a good communicator, and I think that a lot of my irritation with bad communicators comes from my experience in high school. High school for me was not the best time of my life (I'll discuss that in a later post), and I got seriously burned time and again because of people having a strange and, to me, incomprehensible inability to communicate. I don't know if any of you readers have ever been the victim of bad communication, but it hurts. A lot.

At work a couple of weeks ago, I got to the office and didn't hear anything from anyone for 5 hours. No emails, phone calls, nada. I just sat in the office on my own for most of the day, trying to occupy myself. It would have been completely fine if I had known what was going on. That's where the communication thing comes in. Even a simple text would have made me feel better. I don't actually care that I was there for 5 hours before anyone showed up, but I do care that I didn't know why no one had showed up for 5 hours (which I still actually don't know).

So that's it. Communication. It's really simple and it's a much more considerate way to deal with people.

I would beg to differ. Recognizing a problem is only a tiny step to fixing it, and what a good communicator is is different to each person. You may recognize what you like in communication, but that isn't the same for every person.

I have to agree with Anonymous on two counts - I think you can know what a good communicator is but fail to communicate well. I also think that it is often what other people think of your communicating that determines if you are "good" or not, not what you think of your own communication.